http://www.wimba.com/assets/Wimba_Terry_Pollard_Community_College_Week_Fall_Tech_Supplement_Oct_5_2009.pdf
Read the original article in Community College Week’s Fall 2009 Technology Supplement (on page 4) here
By Terry Pollard, eLearning Specialist,
State Board for Community and Junior Colleges of Mississippi
It’s become fairly obvious in the past decade that collaboration is critical to teaching and learning today. Traditional classroom lecture is becoming less and less common, with research supporting the benefits of collaborative learning. In fact, go as far back as 1995 to a Journal of Technology Education article, “Collaborative Learning Enhances Critical Thinking,” and you’ll find their research indicates that “…students who participated in collaborative learning had performed significantly better on the critical- thinking test than students who studied individually.”
While collaboration has always been a part of education, the resources and tools that are available today have made it possible for students, faculty, staff and administrators to interact and communicate in ways far richer than were imaginable just a few years ago. This has greatly contributed to enhancing student and faculty engagement at The Mississippi Virtual Community College.
With 1,200 instructors and over 20,000 enrollments, the virtual community college recognized the need to increase opportunities for collaboration among students and faculty. In January 2009, after a comprehensive 12-month evaluation process, we deployed the Wimba Collaboration Suite, integrated with the Blackboard platform. This new solution enabled both synchronous and asynchronous learning to take place through a wide range of technologies supporting voice, video, text, instant messaging, white boarding, application sharing and surveys.
After deployment, a three-week, free training course was offered to all faculty members exposing them to the toolset. In addition to familiarizing them with the technology, we wanted to help them discover student-centered, student-generated uses for Wimba that would demonstrate content mastery or knowledge transfer. In a short time, many were using voice e-mail, voice presentations, voice boards and podcasts to interact with their classes. The feedback from both instructors and students was extremely positive, and we saw this as a welcome change that indicated an improvement in the online experience.
I have seen this kind of improvement in my own courses; in a literature course I teach, I have had much success getting my students to host a “radio call-in show.” For this assignment, they choose a literary work, receive questions on the text from “callers,” and then post a response within a short timeframe. As an evaluator of learning, I can better ascertain what each student is bringing to the table, which can be difficult in more traditional forms of online assessment, such as the discussion board.
I have also had a lot of success with a “reading-guide” podcast, where challenging passages in a literary work are supplemented with instructor commentary. Students play the podcast as they finish a difficult stanza or section. The response has been very positive and it seems to be improving students’ interest in the subject matter as well as their understanding of the material.
I can envision many other ways this technology will be leveraged to enhance education. For example, imagine the challenges in teaching an online “Beginning English” class at the community college level. You’re covering parts of speech and basic sentence writing. One problem, historically, in teaching “Beginning English” online, has been the impracticality of teaching parts of speech in a fluid way. It’s always been taught in a method that best appeals to read/write learners, not visual learners. The online environment has made this particularly challenging. But with Wimba Pronto, an enterprise instant messaging platform, I can see this changing.
The instant messaging capabilities of Wimba Pronto enable instructors to reach students in a live environment, discuss and demonstrate parts of speech, then demonstrate the diagramming through the use of drag and drop in the whiteboard. Heretofore, there hasn’t been a tool in the online realm that could replicate this experience in the face-to-face environment. And in fact, I think Wimba Pronto may do it better since often underserved, underperforming student writers would balk at being asked to come up and write on a classroom whiteboard, but would jump at the chance to do this online.
There is a very slight learning curve for community college instructors getting up to speed on this technology. In fact we often call Wimba Voice Tools “VCR technology,”—if you can operate a VCR, you can create a voice board. So instructors have the opportunity and tools to empower students to take control of their learning, without investing much time or energy prior to their adoption of it.
And finally, administrators benefit from integrating these tools into their day-to-day student life experience. For example, help desks can be created across the campus, whether it be a learning lab, a financial aid help desk, or other support-based office.
In the last few years, higher education has seen an explosion in the growth of new tools and technologies for the online instructor and student. But very few tools help to improve the actual learning experience. Wimba is one exception. They seem to have taken inspiration from the old Chinese proverb: “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”